For the first time together, these short stories, which have already appeared in various themed anthologies, give us a portrait of Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone. They are five tiles that help define the character for those who already know him and serve as an introduction for those who have never read him: a grumpy, transgressive, rough policeman, often bordering on brutality, who nevertheless knows the heart of men and always knows where he stands.

A portrait of Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone. Five tiles that help define the character for those who already know him and serve as an introduction for those who have never read him. Short stories already published in various anthologies that this volume brings together for the first time. The first-which gives its name to the entire collection and is little less than a short novel in breadth-has a macabre, almost horror-like beginning: at the cemetery, inside a gentile chapel, an unknown corpse is found lying on top of another's coffin; the only clue is a strange wedding ring. But soon the story takes the typical paths that inspire Antonio Manzini: grafting existential hardships, social criticism, deep feelings onto a mysterious police investigation; all told with an ironic humor bordering on sarcasm, made up of quick quips and paradoxes, which in the short measure of the stories even seems to be accentuated by concentration. The other stories that follow-three friends on a mountaineering trip that ended in death; a cheating soccer match between lawmen; a crime in the "closed room" of a train; a harmless hermit killed in an abandoned little church-are investigations that lead, according to the black humor that never leaves Schiavone, to "an uncomfortable, bleak, sad conclusion, more than the sky of this city." He, the undisputed protagonist, is a cop who is not upstanding, often bordering on brutality, but who can recognize a real person wherever and however he shows up. A man who cannot stand the time in which he lives, for so many reasons, but mostly because it has snatched from him the most important thing in life.